Following last week's post on 2015, I wanted to focus on what's next in the coming year. Here are my predictions for what will happen in 2016.

I’ve spent more time on the first three items, which revolve around some news from the past week.

Twitter will raise char limit to 10,000 but the average tweet length will stay below 200 chars. Feed curation will remain the primary hurdle for new users.

It’s great to see Twitter shaking things up on product, despite what its fervent core user base might hurl at them for it. It’s been clear for a few years now that Twitter needs to make some changes if they want to see additional user growth: the product has too steep of a learning curve for new users. The problem with this announcement (if it does actually happen) is that it doesn't make Twitter easier to pick up and use.

When I first started using Twitter, the hardest part wasn’t “how can I fit this thought into 140 chars?” It was "who do I follow to make my Twitter feed worth reading?" Facebook addressed this interest curation through their back-end algorithm; the end user rarely had to actively think about managing their feed.

Twitter, on the other hand, has always put feed curation in the hands of its users. This was liberating for a few (the core group that became the Twitter power users,) but for many, was more work than the average user wanted. Twitter Moments was a great step in this direction, as was my favorite release in recent years, the “while you were away” highlights that sits within the reverse-chronological feed.

Again, the 10k char announcement is great, and will definitely make Twitter more searchable. I’d just like to see more updates that focus on helping new users find their interests on Twitter.

AWS will continue to dominate cloud computing services...

The big news from last week was Netflix’s announcement that they flipped the switch and are now streaming in 130 countries around the world. This is certainly very big news for Netflix, who in the process of expanding to these countries will be building a global CDN with ins at their local ISPs.
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It’s equally big news for AWS, who will play a key role in helping Netflix scale up to this global bandwidth and server demand. 2016 will be the year we see just how much AWS stands to gain from the types of global expansion announcements Netflix has just made. (This is a story that will continue to play out for all of the other gigantic AWS customers -- Spotify (already pretty global but room for more expansion), Amazon.com (duh), Airbnb, Slack, Pinterest, Twilio, the list goes on.)

...but Amazon Prime will not unseat Netflix as a media streaming service.

The CDN element I mentioned above is crucial here. There’s a long-term projection in this Netflix story (not for 2016 but I’ll include it anyways) that Amazon will develop its own original content, using the same methods Netflix used to best the traditional original content producers.2
Theory has it that as Amazon continues to create its own original series, it will outbid Netflix, thereby developing better original content, by nature of the Amazon growth machine (i.e. Amazon Prime Video is Netflix, plus the added revenue streams from the rest of Amazon.)

I could see that happening, but I don’t think it will. Netflix going global means they’ll be the first streaming service in a lot of these markets. Local ISPs will need help in supporting the bandwidth increase, and they’ll take it from Netflix in the form of on-site boxes. In this way the Netflix global CDN will perpetuate itself, and widen the moat b/w Netflix and those streaming services that might try to follow it into global markets. (Good detailed read on this here.)

The end-state here is a symbiotic relationship between Amazon and Netflix in which Amazon’s place is secured through AWS, and Netflix’s through its global CDN.

Oculus Rift will ship with early-platform games this year. VR won’t be a big deal for the general public until its use case expands to include GoPro360 videos and other user-generated content. My “wow! technology!” moment of 2015 came when I saw a GoPro360 video on Facebook. Can you imagine how awesome this experience will be when you can see it through a reality-inducing Oculus Rift headset?

Facebook (+Instagram) will continue to crush mobile ad sales. Is anyone still logging into FB using a browser?

The general public will continue to be underwhelmed by Bitcoin’s impact and overwhelmed by how it works.

SpaceX will land two additional boosters in 2016, but this month's upcoming landing-at-sea will miss. It’s the older Falcon9 model that failed twice on water landings.

ESPN will continue to lose subscription numbers...Each year a class of graduates leaves college, and buys a Netflix subscription instead of a bundled cable package.